A 2.5 Year Reflection of My Own Climbing
Disclaimer: Following post is more of a ramble than a coherent collection of thoughts because I don’t really know where to begin or end writing.
I am an overthinker and I have been one my whole life. I stress over every possible combination of actions and consequences I can think of when it comes to decision making. Some of my personal decisions may have been perceived as impulsive (by my immediate family mostly), and they largely were, but not because I wasn’t thinking about the way they would play out but rather I ended up getting overwhelmed by the barrage of possibilities and said “Fuck it.” and picked something in the end.
You may be wondering how this is related to my climbing. Well, as an overthinker, I am fairly predisposed to being a certain type of climber: A project climber. And over the past 2.5 years that I have been climbing, this is what I have been, a project climber.
As far as climbing goes, 2.5 years is a blink of an eye. Most climbers climb for decades, although I am convinced this stat is skewed due to survivor’s bias as many quit within the first year. Regardless, the ones who stay in the sport stay for a long time.
In those 2.5 years, I managed to climb some hard routes for the climbing tenure I had, largely because of my overthinking and (I have to admit) because of my rather large insecurities (which affect everything in my life but that is a topic for another time). I felt (and still do feel) comfortable sitting on a rope, obssessing over a 2 cm difference between two possible footholds, calculating whether the higher one which is way worse than the lower one would give me a marginal improvement in making the next big move to the hold. I could (and still can) stay on a rope for 2 hours, trying the same move with those two different footholds, stepping on them in different angles, shifting my hips to feel if there is a better balance point, dropping the other leg, dropping the other hand etc. Just you name it, every combination you can think of, I am inclined to try until I am certain I cannot improve the move given my current abilities. This obssessing over is als futher fueled by the said insecurities because (quoting the voice inside my head) “If I can’t do this climb/move, what good am I?”. Yeah, pretty fucked up. But this resulted in a few things:
1- My physical climbing abilities have gotten better very fast because trying hard moves and really intentionally learning from them just expands your climbing abilities. You get stronger and you are forced to understand why a move works and why it doesn’t, and you are forced to learn new techniques quite fast if you want to do that move
2- I can try and maybe climb routes above my pay grade, and when I send them, I look kinda like I know what I am doing (I really don’t know what I am doing)
3- I have gotten so comfortable working out every single minute detail that I have no idea how to “just climb” things
4- I have developed an even more lopsided set of mental abilities. I am good at being patient with projects, I can persevere and keep going back to them even when it seems hopeless but when it comes to flashing/onsighting I have no mental tools and techniques to just try a sequence see if it works or not. As soon as something gets even a little complicated while onsighting, I go to project mode and instantly want to explore all the possible ways to climb that section instead of just choosing one and committing.
5- As much as I hate to admit this, I am afraid of failing to flash/onsight “easier” routes, because it is closely related to my self-worth and if I can’t onsight a 6b while climbing 7b+, my brain tells me I am not a real climber and I get MASSIVE impostor syndrome. It sucks big time and makes me feel like utter garbage, so I avoid even trying. Bleh.
Above all of the issues and the triumphs, I simply love climbing. There has not been a single day out climbing (no matter how difficult it was mentally/physically) where at the end of the day I didn’t feel like it was an amazing day. Not going to lie, whether I send or not matters to me immensely, but I am finding more and more that it is less and less tied to my self-worth. At some point in time, not sure when, I started to embrace the idea of failing, regardless of the type of climbing (onsight/project) or the grade of the climb.
Funnily enough, now that I am slightly more okay with the idea of failing/not sending (not even remotely close to being completely ok with it but getting there) and having it be less damaging to my self-worth, I am enjoying climbing a lot more. My goal is no longer to “tick the climb” or “climb harder”. I don’t choose routes based on their grade as much, I choose routes based on first and foremost whether I will enjoy the climbing. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy doing moves that are hard for me, that’s just what I like (hello moonboard, I love you). That generally means I gravitate towards climbs that have hard (for me) moves. But if two routes are close in terms of their challenge for me, I will choose the nicer one even if it is less “prestigious” in terms of grade.
I have also been finding that lots of “easier” climbs have moves that are hard for me for one reason or the other. And I noticed recently that this annoys me if the climb is “supposed to be” easy. That is such a dumb thought. If the move is hard, it is hard, and if that is what I enjoy, I should be able to enjoy it regardless of the grade of the route. But that’s ego for you. My ego is bruised when I struggle on a route that is supposed to be “easy” for me. And it is even more bruised when someone says “This should be easy for you” because then I am not only failing to fulfill my own expectations, I am also failing to live up to my image, whatever that means. This is such a dumb train of thought. If I am finding a move hard, there is a reason for this, and there is something to be learned. I can’t control other people’s expectations, that’s their problem really, and I don’t even know why I think other people expect anything tbh, they probably don’t, but my own expectations are somewhat in my own control. Once I noticed all of these complex, ego-driven subconscious thought processes, and realised that actually, what I care about the most is enjoying my climbing and climbing well, I started enjoying struggling on easier routes quite a bit. It is an opportunity to learn quickly whereas otherwise I would be spending hours just to even begin trying to learn on a route that is truly at my limit.
So, enough rambling. Bottomline is, my goals have shifted. For whatever reason for the past 2 years or so, I had a chip on my shoulder, trying to prove something to myself and to other people I suppose by climbing “hard” grades that are supposed to be out of my reach. This chip has started to fall a bit. Now I don’t really have any quantifiable goals (such as climb X amount of grade Y and climb Z grade by date D). My goal is to be proud of my climbing and get more confident in my climbing abilities. Climbing is a sport where you never really stop learning, there is no end. I will always have weaknesses, have things to improve on. But this is what makes it endless and life-long. And that’s what I love.
